The golden days of autumn — when air is crisp in the morning and reassuringly warm in the afternoons, when the aspen leaves turn and the geese start to fly south — pose a pleasant change of pace for those of us in Summit County and the rest of the mountains.

The tens of thousands of SUVs and RVs clogging the Eisenhower Tunnel eastbound on Labor Day represented the last wave of outsiders subsiding from the high country.

Oh, sure, there still are the weekend leaf peepers and occasional wayward empty nesters who find their way up to the mountains, but for the next 2½ months, the neighborhood largely is ours again, and it takes on the feeling of a peaceful small town.

Traffic eases, as we see far fewer of those oversized vehicles with Midwestern plates abruptly making right turns from the left lane or puttering along at 20 mph, the gape-mouthed drivers oblivious to the string of impatient locals stuck behind them.

Many of the half-empty restaurants now offer 2-for-1 specials as a form of local appreciation, and others close to give their fatigued wait staff and cooks a well-earned reprieve from the large-bodied lunchers and gluttonous gormands.

Don’t get me wrong: In our tourism-dependent economy, we love and need our guests. They fill our hotel rooms, dine out, book tee times, rent bikes and buy souvenirs, dropping enormous sums of money for the pleasure of visiting the place we call home.

Some 58 million people visited Colorado last year, spending a record $10.8 billion, according to a study by Longwoods International commissioned by the Colorado Tourism Office.

But when the interlopers leave as summer fades into fall and the kids head back to school, there’s a palpable sense of relief and a pleasant easiness that returns, if only briefly.

There’s a dead period in the spring, too — “mud season” in April and May — but the weather typically is capricious and cold, conducive to leaving the county for a tropical getaway.

Fall is different. The dry, high-sky days and the clear, starry nights with just a hint of real chill keep us close to home but lure us outside, eager to harvest every last drop of sunshine as if on borrowed time.

After three months of directing outsiders to the nearest public toilet or pleasantly explaining, yet again, that flip-flops are not appropriate footwear for hiking our long, rocky trails, a certain “hospitality fatigue” sets in among all but the most terminally cheery.

One friend who works at a hotel acknowledges that the late-summer visitors deserve the same friendly reception as those earlier in the season, but sometimes the smile is a bit forced and his suppressed sarcasm creeps out as his enthusiasm wanes.

“If they ask if they can get over Trail Ridge Road (in Rocky Mountain National Park) in an hour, I tell them: ‘Of course you can.’ I don’t tell them you’d have to be a professional race-car driver on a closed course, with no other traffic and no wildlife on the road — conditions that don’t ever exist there. But really? I mean, who wants to do Trail Ridge in an hour?”

This is the same love-hate relationship with tourists that caused Coloradans in 1993 to vote resoundingly against continuing a 0.2 percent state tax on tourism-related sales to fund for the Colorado Tourism Office. “It just means more people between me and my favorite fishing hole” was a popular sentiment of the time.

These days, the state again spends about $14 million out of the general fund on tourism promotion, resulting in $5.3 billion in marketing-influenced travel, according the Longwoods study.

That dichotomy — needing tourists and yet resenting them — perhaps lends some painful truth to the bumper sticker that reads: “Welcome to Colorado. Now leave.”

Steve Lipsher of Silverthorne has worked as a Denver Post reporter and was an editor of the Summit Daily News.